Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

“Things can never be as they were between us,” she said.  “That you cannot expect.  But—­”

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.  She reddened.

“It was good of you to offer to release me—­” He spared her.

“Are you not going to hold me to it, then?”

“I am not.”  She paused, and then forced herself to it.  “I will try to be a good wife to you.”

“Thank you.”

CHAPTER III

It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby.  The place was haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour.  Anne had the horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from it.  For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber.  Scale is prevailingly, conspicuously commercial.  It is not beautiful.  Its streets are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular.  The colouring of Scale is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable.  It is built in brown, paved and pillared in unclean grey.  Its rivers and dykes run brown under a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality struggling with visible corruption.  The wonder is that it should be born at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey.  Anne remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her.  She was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly, and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie.  Like some mourner for whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved, she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal cruelty and irony of Nature.  She was bearing her own heart to its burial; and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion’s respectful silence she gathered that, though lost to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood.  She was grateful for that silence of his, because it justified her own.